A Defections Conceptual Framework

Why Do Regime Supporters Cease Their Support?

Jonathan Pinckney

2026-02-20

The Motivating Question

When do supporters of authoritarian and democratic backsliding regimes cease to support their leaders? When do they defect?

  • Defection is consequential — it shapes regime stability and transformation
  • Yet we lack a unifying framework for understanding defection across contexts

Goal: Develop a framework to guide research and inform practitioners seeking to advance, defend, and repair democracy.

Power Rests on Obedience

All political regimes rely on key groups and institutions to provide power and resources (Sharp 1973):

  • Security forces → capacity for repression
  • Media → regime narratives and public compliance
  • Citizens → taxes, obedience, legitimacy
  • Business elites → economic resources
  • Legislators & bureaucrats → institutional functioning

What Is Defection?

Defection is any instance in which a regime supporter substantively decreases their level of regime support.

Examples:

  • Soldiers refuse to open fire on demonstrators
  • Legislators resign or vote against their party
  • Businesses give fewer campaign donations
  • Party elites stop echoing leadership’s talking points
  • People who once praised a dictator start mocking him in private

Defection is especially crucial in processes of nonviolent resistance, whose logic rests not on eliminating opponents but on shifting them to one’s side (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011).

The Spectrum of Allies and Opponents

Adapted from Oppenheimer and Lakey (1965):

  • Loyalty Shifts = any movement along the spectrum
  • Defection = any leftward movement beginning in active or passive support

Scope Conditions

This project focuses on defection within:

1. Authoritarian and democratic backsliding regimes

  • Repression makes defection far riskier than in healthy democracies (Davenport 2007)
  • Different risk environments → different motivators
  • Core motivation: understanding how to protect, repair, and advance democracy

2. The contemporary world (post–Cold War)

  • Modern authoritarianism relies more on pseudo-democratic institutions, less on brute repression (Guriev and Treisman 2019)
  • Democratic backsliding today is gradual, centered on executive aggrandizement under a veneer of legality (Bermeo 2016; Riedl et al. 2024)

What Do We Already Know?

Different forms of defection have been studied in isolation:

Three Consensus Findings

Defection is Consequential

Defection is Difficult

Defection is Complex but Predictable

Guiding Assumptions

Defection is Individual or Collective

  • Individual (micro): Personal decisions that may or may not affect one’s group
  • Group (meso): Collective defection that cannot be reduced to aggregated individual decisions

Meaningful research can be done at either level, and ideal research will incorporate both.

Defection Is Social

Understanding defection requires attention to:

  • Embeddedness within broader social networks
  • Information Flows through those networks

Defection Has Multi-Faceted, Obscure Motivations

People defect for many reasons — often simultaneously:

  • Rational self-interest (material utility maximization)
  • Moral conviction (Pearlman 2018)
  • Changing social norms of appropriate behavior

These motivations interact:

  • Material interests are easier to advance with moral justification
  • Principled commitment is easier to sustain when materially beneficial

Key caution: Self-reported explanations are one data source among many, not definitive answers. People construct narratives to shape self and collective image (Nisbett and Wilson 1977).

Defection Is Behavioral

  • Defection is defined not by what people think but by what they do.
  • There must be an observable behavioral change vis-à-vis the regime for us to say defection has occurred
  • But speech counts as behavior!
  • What counts as defection depends what constitutes loyalty for that individual or group.

Defection Takes Many Forms


Breaking (exit/outside) Binding (voice/inside)
Speaking Public condemnation Private disapproval
Acting Joining a demonstration Creating internal reforms
Standing in the way Disobeying orders Foot-dragging


  • Breaking severs ties with the regime (visible, explicit)
  • Binding maintains identity within regime while applying internal pressure (quiet, behind-the-scenes)
  • Defection over time likely begins with binding → then breaking

Initial Propositions

Defection Requires a Way Out

Regime supporters typically won’t defect without perceiving an acceptable post-defection future.

  • Corrupt business elites fear both losing benefits and opposition animosity (Sinanoglu 2025)
  • Without viable post-defection pathways, defection is particularly rare (Langston 2002)
  • Eliminating alternatives is a key strategy of authoritarian control

Implication for resistance campaigns:

  • Create alternative institutions
  • Negotiate exit plans
  • Promote an inclusive vision of a post-regime future where potential defectors can see themselves

It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know

Defection is driven by social connections and a “logic of appropriateness” (March and Olsen 1998).

  • Positive connections to individuals/groups with lower regime loyalty → reduced loyalty, increased defection probability
  • When group boundaries blur (supporters see their group as including opponents) → in-group loyalty no longer implies regime loyalty

For resistance campaigns, defection is more likely when:

  1. The campaign increases social connections to regime supporters
  2. The campaign signals that dissent is more widespread and durable than previously believed

But Material Consequences Matter

Social connections are important but likely insufficient. Defection in authoritarian contexts is high-risk, high-cost, thus may only occur when material costs of defection are lower than costs of loyalty.

Tension: Social vs. material logics of sparking defection

Example: A business supporting an authoritarian leader

  • Social approach: Patronize the business → build connections → social logic of appropriateness
  • Material pressure approach: Boycott → cut connections → heighten material costs of loyalty

Campaigns are likely to be effective when they sequence social and material strategies — material pressure may be most effective when seen as a temporary break in a relationship that can be restored.

Step Size and Regime Type

Little steps are easier than big steps

  • Most common defection: passive support → neutrality
  • Jumps of multiple levels (active support → active opposition) are rare

But authoritarianism can make defection all-or-nothing

  • Authoritarian regimes punish even modest loyalty declines with severe repression
  • This accumulates large numbers of false supporters (Kuran 1991)
  • When they defect, they do so dramatically

Hypothesis: Defection scale is directly related to degree of authoritarianism. More open → small, frequent defections. More authoritarian → rare but large and abrupt.

Discussion

Is This Framework Helpful?

Do the concepts and definitions in this framework illuminate the relevant phenomena?

In particular: is it helpful to lump together small moves and big moves?

Gains and Losses

What is gained and what is lost from thinking of defections in this high-level, unified way?

Some considerations:

  • Gain: Cross-pollination of insights across fragmented literatures
  • Gain: Unified language for practitioners and researchers
  • Loss: Context-specific dynamics may be obscured
  • Loss: Risk of over-generalizing across diverse phenomena

Evaluating the Assumptions

Which assumptions are clear/unclear or helpful/unhelpful? Are there contradictions?

The five assumptions:

  1. Defection can be individual or collective
  2. Defection is social
  3. Defection has multi-faceted, obscure motivations
  4. Defection is behavioral
  5. Defection takes many context-specific forms

What’s Missing?

What additional assumptions are necessary to understand defections?

Some possible areas to explore:

  • Role of emotions (fear, hope, shame, anger) as distinct from rational calculation or moral conviction?
  • Multi-dimensional Loyalty - this framework treats regime loyalty as unidimensional. Is that a problem? How should we think about the different directions loyalty can go?
  • Reversibility — defection can be temporary. How should we think about its potential to be reversed?

Other Critiques?

  • What are the methodological challenges of studying defection given the framework?
  • Are the scope conditions (authoritarian + backsliding regimes) too broad or too narrow?
  • How does this framework relate to adjacent concepts (exit/voice/loyalty, methods of nonviolent action)?

Thank You!

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